Nonetheless, as Esmail argues, both it and Dickens's portrayal of Sophy do indeed underscore Victorian fiction's severance of language from sign, which renders the deaf heroines' linguistic, but manual, expression incommunicable to readers.

At the end of the novel, Melmoth reveals that the incommunicable condition that he has been offering to "wretches in their fearful hour of extremity" is "the promise of deliverance and immunity" from their current problems on the "condition of their exchanging situations with [him]" (409).

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